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The End of The Line for Iridium 136

Posted by Hemos from the better-than-fourth-of-july dept.
slashdoter writes "Motorola said on Wednesday it was finalizing a schedule to destroy the 66 satellites of Iridium." They have finalized the schedule because they've been unable to find qualified buyers for the satellites. Wow. Billions of dollars coming streaming down into our atmosphere.
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The End of The Line for Iridium More

The End of The Line for Iridium

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  • CLOSE THE <I> TAG!!!!!!!!! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Almost everything on the front page is now italicised. Real impressive.

  • The world on welfare... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ...is all this is, heh. Should we support the entire world? Does it matter that all these people are dying, or just the fact that we are not dying now? Will population kill us all in the end? More people have walked the earth in the last 40 years than all the people who had ever lived before them combined. At present growth rates at least. Amazing...

  • My bid .... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    U.S. $1.00

  • This is a good thing, here's why: (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The thing was an expensive dinosaur, before it's time. Better, cheaper, smaller technology will come around some day. Probably sooner than we think. If this expensive white elephant was filling up the market niche, sucking up all the potential revenue, just because it got there first, this would prevent (or delay) the little guys from marketing a more effecient product.

    So it's a bad thing that they wasted all the effort on this project. The technology wasn't quite ready or cost effective. But it's a good thing that it isn't lingering on, choking off potential competitors.
  • Besides -- if we keep putting more and more up there, without clearing out the old stuff, then eventually we'll have some catastrophic disaster that'll take out an awfully large amount of satellites.

    Bear in mind that (unless I'm mistaken), NASA is already thinking about the problem of how to get rid of space debris. Basically, the final act of ANY space project MUST be to clear up like this. Also, in the case of larger objects, where does the liability go if it comes out of orbit and levels somebody's house??
    John
  • No, I think you're spot on.

    This is another BRILLIANT example of what appears to be a totally fucked up company. (www.fuckedcompany.com)

    Was Bill Walker somehow involved in setting up Irridium?

    if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
  • Looks like the Save Iridium [saveiridium.org] organisation couldn't.

    Too bad. They had a nice (and noble) idea.

  • The only reason IE puts up with it, as best as I can tell, is that MICROS~1's software produces some of the most broken HTML I've ever seen. Ever export an all-text Word document to HTML? Should be as simple as putting <P> tags in there, right? Ha!

    --Joe
    --
  • Mot is sued because they put the damn things up in the first place

    Actually, international treaties are quite clear -- the national government of the site from which the sat was launched into space has full financial responsibility for any damage the sat inflicts. Not Motorola.

    Steven E. Ehrbar
  • wow! I even included a non existant link? cool...how did I do that when only you see it?

    as for the misspellings, you try and type on one of these damn palm based computers with wireless access while on a train, and you'd understand mr anal about spelling... are you an english teacher? because anyone overzealous about spelling in a joke forum like shashdot really has to have some issues...

    oh well.. Off to butcher the english language while getting paid obscene amounts of money.
  • They should use this to their advantage... try and get the satellites to burn their brightest on the way in a plunge them in view. Make a statement such as "If we can make the stars fall what do you think we can do for you?"

    Will be interesting to see how their PR team can handle this one. Motorola is known for its environmentally friendly techniques that it tries to employ. Wonder if anyone will pull up the "raining garbage" ploy on them. :)
  • Pennies from heaven. =)
  • Losing the satelites is a waste, but it's also just a "shit happens" waste, not an "oh my gawd we blew it!" waste.

    The efficiency of a device is measured in how much of the input energy got converted into the kind of output energy you wanted. An electric motor converts most of its electrical input into mechanical output with a little heat and noise produced. A space heater converts most of its electrical input into heat output with a little noise going to loss.

    In this case, a coroporation is a machine for converting "manpower" into "livelyhood". Had the energy devoted to Irridiam been spent somewhere else, more livelyhood might have been produced, but the loss of a few satelites compared to the livelyhood produced by the company is pretty small. Motorola is still a basically successful company, and in a free market that means enough livelyhood is produced to keep their employees happy.

    We destroy old buildings to put up new ones. Living things die so that new ones can grow up in their place, and have a chance to do better than their peers (darwinism). In this case, Irridiam tried to fill a role and proved not to be viable. This is the equivalent of a child dying of some disease so the parents can try again without the burden of keeping the child alive. The parents will mourn their loss, but they will also continue to have children who may be better or worse.

    As long as no coercian is involved, things can't be too bad. The stockholders take a calculated gamble, the employees are paid either way, and the customers wouldn't buy equipment if the company had a bad rep. There's no reason for anyone to be too upset.
  • Nah, you can still spend a bill after blowing your nose in it. :-O.
  • Yeah, and dysprosium just doesn't have the same ring to it does it?
  • Did they try to auction them on Ebay :-?
  • Hey, for those of us who don't smoke, can we change that to blowing our noses into a $100 bill?
    --
    then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
  • Five Billions Dollars of technology and what are you doing with it?

    Burning it.
    --
    then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
  • Any chance Motorola would sell these to the military's missle defense program to use as targets? I mean the big problem so far with the missle defense so far is hitting a moving target. When I can't do that, I switch to not moving targets. You know, the whole sitting ducks thing.

  • Italics (Score:1)

    by VSc ( 30374 )
    Should someone close the tag for Hemos?.. OK, here:
    </i>

    Thanks.

    __________________________________________

  • They can write them off as a major business expense/loss. It may cause a few ruffles in stock prices, but it'll do great things for them when it comes time to post thier earnings and pay appropriate taxes.

    Dirk
  • Much more likely considering that they probably WILL get 100x more usage at 1/10 the price. They just introduced coverage in Russia (and they now cover most of the western hemisphere as well as Europe and Australia) - though the people there will still have to work an hour just to talk for a minute on these things (and of course the hardware is prohibitively expensive). Satellite and cellular phones are the best choice for 3rd world countries and those that have terrain that is unsuitable for laying ground wires.

  • Cool! (Score:1)

    by GavK ( 58709 )
    Another thing to look out for in the night sky...

    Play the what satellite did they plunge into the pacific today game...

  • iridium satellites burn up in Earths atmosphere.

    Ahhh! The atmosphere...AHHHHH!

    Uhhhhh! The atmosphere....Uhhhhhhhh!!!!!

  • Check this out: iridium GIF [digitalkamera.de] (its german, but you probably can understand it ;)


    Samba Information HQ
  • Oh No! The Atmosphere! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...!
  • IIRC, Iridium calls routed via satellite cost just 1.75USD/min, no 20.

    Mark Duell
  • If you send $20 to my PayPal account, I'll let you take one of these babies out of orbit. I work for Motorola, so I'll configure your right mouse button to be the fire button just as soon as I get the money.
  • Their major function seems to have been to make life difficult for astronomers. (These things are numerous and *bright*.) Their destruction will be a relief.
  • Masturbate into it.

    OOOOOOOOOOOHHH Ben...


    --

  • The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

    Words to live by.


    --

  • My feeling exactly. All that time, energy & money burnt up is crazy. THEY ARE STILL USEFUL!!!!Do you know how many people that could feed and extend poverty suffering according to Sally Struthers?

    3333333.3333333333333333333333333 people for 5 years! (check my math - $30/month)

    Good point - if they couldn't get something as trivial as a business plan & sales working properly, what makes us safe from plummeting satelites - just think of the poor martians on mars where they have no atmosphere to burn them up. With my luck, they'll all find the 'window' into our atmosphere and descend at the right angle & speed as not to burn up & land on my car.

    If the price to own & use one hadn't been so ungodly, I would have purchased one. Not that I can take advantage of the usefulness driving on the highway in Canada but I live close to the mountains where the cell phones just don't cut it & it'd be nice to have a means of communication with help & family.
    Speaking of which:

    CANTEL SUCKS!!!! Can'Tel if it's going to work or not.

    An co-worker pointed out something interesting (to me) about the whole mars thing: Each satelite that was supposed to re-photograph mars in hi-res has crashed. Only the low-res (Pathfinder) made it. Any conspiracy junkies out there??

    --Clay

  • It's a shame that nobody stepped up and seriously tried to buy the things. They're a pretty impressive infrastructure floating around in space that I'm sure could be used for _something_.

    --
    Max V.
  • Mot earned it's money selling you things. Sure, you got what you wanted when you bought each and every Mot product, and hopefully were satisfied. Your satisfaction does not end the chain of cause and effect. Your effort, in small part, built this thing and was equally wasted.

    Indirectly, you have paid even more for this. Mot's efforts added to demand, and so raised all prices marginally. More importantly, all of that money could have been spent on something usefull that you would have been satisfied to purchase. Resourses destroyed don't come back. When supply falls relative to demand, prices rise.

    Mot will pay, and so will you.

  • ...someone needed it. I have patience.
  • Or a Libyan presidential palace?
  • The question is: can you do anything with it that generates enough revenue to justify the enormous costs to keep these buggers up and running?
  • They will not always burn fully so it must be ensured that what is left falls somewhere into a safe zone, like the ocean for example. Deorbiting something with a target drop zone in mind is not exactly trivial.
  • They had initially planned to launch 77 (hence the name Iridiuam, chemical element 77) but they launched 66, the remaining 11 left as spares.
  • Is there enough propellant left in these things to maybe slingshot the moon and orbit Mars? If so, we could use Iridium to form a cheap communications array for future Moon and Mars missions. We could send about forty of 'em to Mars and 20 to the Moon, and still have a few spares hanging out in Earth orbit..
  • It seems from the article that this is a all or nothing thing. Why can't Iridium sell the SATs individually, so that they migh be able used for something other than the Iridium network?
  • I feel sorry for guys who spent years to design the things. Ok, they got paid for it, but it must be painful to watch them burn.

    As to the waste of resources, it is not such a big deal. A single air carrier represents a much bigger waste. Or what about the proposed $60bn missile defence program?

  • Isn't that the system that's raining debris all over Europe?
  • the most INCREDIBLE f*ck-up we've seen in the business sector in the last two centuries?!
    I mean, "PHREEEEEEOOOOOOWWWWW!!" - you would dismiss a story with a plot like this as being totally ridiculous.
    I feel sorry for the people whose hard work has been wasted on this.
  • Why not just auction the suckers?
  • Since they can't seem to auction off the satellites, they should auction off the cool light show when they throw 'em into the atmosphere! How much do you think someone would pay to see a once-in-a-lifetime show above their house/tropical resort/hidden fortress? :)
  • Maybe they could give them to the us to have some sitting ducks to practice with their new anti-missile failures!
  • Guess people who are a long way from civilization (and outside cellphone coverage areas) are there for a reason.
  • Yeah, i can see it now.

    `Lot 13 - bunch of satellites forming part of communications network. Genuine reason for sale - its shit.`
  • A while ago, Wired Magazine [wired.com] had an article about Iridium [wired.com], yet again their futurist crap about how it was going to change the world (has anyone noticed how often they publish tripe like this?).
  • the atmosphere.... ahhhhhhhhh

    all persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental. - Kurt Vonnegut
  • Look at the Globalstar revenues -- even if they double revenues every quarter, the top line will be $6M this year -- ooof. Kinda hard to pay off billions that way.
  • I doubt many Universities would like to pay the running costs, whici IIFC are in the order of millions of $ per month.
  • At a recent conference up here in Hanover, NH, there were reports that a few Iridium satellites will be purchased by the government and retained as a emergency backup in case of a situation where other communications (i.e. cell phones, land lines, etc) go down around major metropolitan areas. I guess counting the number of shooting Iridium stars to see if they all go down would be the best way to start to verify this. Niles
  • Satellites burning in the atmosphere...
    ... I guess this gives new meaning to the term vaporware
  • You know, this isn't really a bad idea. Use 'em for target practice. It gets rid of the damn things and lets their death serve a somewhat useful purpose.
    Somebody moderate opreagost up, I don't have any point today. This is the best proposal anyone's come up with yet for the disposal of this white elephant.

    "The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
  • I reckon they could auction off the pressing of a 'button' to start the descent of a satellite over a certain area.

    Wouldnt it be cool to press the button one night and the satellite leaves a nice trail over your town. :)

    I would pay for that...
  • Iridium failued because Iridium was a bad idea. Satellites are quite in demand, thank you

    satelites that work that is. if iridium failed only because of business/management problems, the satelites would probably have new homes by now.

    but they don't, which leads me to believe that the technology used in the constellation is crap/inappropriate/worthless. given that it's completely unsuitable for data communications as well, I don't see any technically redeeming qualities...
  • Why not drop them all on New Year's Eve, and recoup some money from party organizers? :-)
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Ebay them!

    A nice featured auction with a low starting bid, and no reserve, and Motorola might get enough money to start their own cell phone company [ebay.com]. ;)

    George Lee

  • as if the NSA doesn't already have their own sattellites...

  • .. and spend all the R&D money they wasted on their outer space ventures on more important things, like faster powerPC chips that actually work at 800-1000 MHz

    or maybe the PR battery will make them rethink their arrogance at not cooperating with IBM on the project they are supposed to be partners on.

    offtopic? maybe.. so mod me.

  • Couldn't resist, actually it's sad that this is happening - I wonder if Global Star [globalstar.com] will survive. Same concept, a little cheaper (~2 bucks a minute vs. ~20).

  • I swear we have more stories about The End of Iridium than we have about The End of The Internet.
    --
  • Engineering Machismo
  • And I guess Iridium wasn't ready for the world, either.

    It was a great idea. I'd love to have a phone that worked anywhere ... but not at such exorbitant prices. And not if I have to carry around a briefcase dedicated to that task, either.
    The obsticles of technology and the cost of the infrastructure were just too much for such an ambitious plan.

    Too much, too early, I guess...

  • Think about it - how many of us would pay for a lottery ticket for the chance to press the button to fire one of those babies out of orbit? I know I would.

  • As I understand it, the reason that they were not able to find any buyers for the network is that it is built so specifically for telephone coverage that it cannot be used for anything else. It can't be used for Internet (at least not at decent speeds), it can't be used for any kind of broadcasting, it can't be partially deorbited to only provide partial coverage, etc etc.

    So the really amazing thing is not that the business plan they had failed, because most business plans fail, but the fact that they spent billions and billions of dollars putting up a network of sattelites, so sure of their own brilliance that they didn't make it the slightest bit flexible. Apparently Motorola is full of yes-men, and nobody even stopped to say "What if we can't sell phone service?".

    It is like orbiting Playstations when they should have put up Linux loaded PCs.

    Well, theres that and the whole "let's give missile technology to dictatorial China so they can launch our sattelites (which we will then burn up)" thing too. I'm not even going to say "conspiracy"...
  • Nope, there are around 22 other phone satelite systems in operation or being planned (see here [msua.org]).

    That also includes a link on what to do if you have an Iridium phone. Apparently a school is taking Iridium phone donations so they can use them in electronics lab about satellite stuff.

  • There are 22 other satellite systems [msua.org] in operation or being planned. I think that shows a fair bit of demand.

    Don't you want to be able to set up a data connection anywhere in the world? Sure, sometimes you want to be alone, but for people that are working on projects in rugged terrain, it probably comes in handy.

    Not that I don't want high-speed too. :)

  • hmm (Score:2)

    by British ( 51765 )
    sixty six satellites!

    One by one, burned out of the atmosphere

    Which satellite will be the sole survivor?

    Stay tuned!

  • Hell yeah sure, those ABM clowns, they'd have orbit after orbit to get locked in on the damn things, and there are powerful radio transmitters on board the Iridium satellites to which the ABMs can home in. That way, the $50-billion ABM fraud^H^H^H^H^Hproject can maybe enjoy a second "success," which, like the first, requires cheating - the use of a transponder on the target. Which, gee, a "rogue state" isn't too likely to install on their ICBM.

    Anyway, any "rogue state" Hell-bent on committing national suicide by nuking a city in the U.S.A. would probably not use an ICBM to deliver the bomb, but would instead transport their warhead (most likely bought, incidentally, from America's good free-market friends in the formerly socialist and now thoroughly kleptocratic Russia) on a boat or a commercial plane. (A couple fun facts! there are some nuclear bombs which weigh as little as 60 lbs.! and drug dealers smuggled over two hundred and fifty tons of cocaine into the U.S.A. last year!) Then once they got the weapon over the border, they'd simply drive it to its target in the U.S.A. via a Ryder truck...

    Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

  • Expensive bulky phones that didn't work indoors? What I'm curious about is how the company ever got the money together to *put* all those damn satellites in orbit. Either, the people putting the money up were dumb (which seems unlikely), or Iridium had some good arguments. Does anyone know what they were?

    I would have thought that in a bizarre way those people might be really employable now! "Hey I'm the guy that convinved all those rich people to give us billions of dollars to make that failed phone network! Now look deeply into my eyes and give me your bank account details..."

    Mike
  • The wasteful bit was building them in the first place. Now that they are up there, the best thing that can be done is to take them down. Their intended purpose is better served by other technology, mostly already in place. They are like a treatment for a disease already cured using a different treatment with fewer adverse side effects. The best thing that can be done is to stop administering the treatment.
  • Here comes Iridium
    Falling on my head like a NATO bomb
    Falling from the sky like a Canadian Sea King
    I want to walk in the particle stream
    I want to dance like astronomers do
    I want to dive into your bunker
    It is raining bits on you

    So baby laugh with me
    Like competitors do
    Walk with me
    Like investors do
    Talk to me
    Like PCS users do

    Here comes Iridium
    Billions burning, what a tragedy
    Tearing Motorola apart like the DOJ
    Oooouch
    I want to walk in the particle stream
    I want to dance like astronomers do
    I want to dive into your bunker
    It is raining bits on you

    So baby laugh with me
    Like competitors do

    Here comes Iridium
    Falling on my head like a NATO bomb
    Falling from the sky like a Canadian Sea King
    (Here comes another, here comes another)
    I want to walk in the particle stream
    I want to dance like astronomers do
    I want to dive into your bunker
    It is raining bits on you

  • I think they expected the technology to work a lot better than it did.

    It must have really sucked to be there for the first tests when they realized that their system was really crappy.

    --
    Max V.
  • But instead, the satellite builders, designers and other people involved in the project got new cars.

    In the end, all that was really wasted was the raw resources (which we won't get back) and the energy that went into the construction (and peoples' time of course but they were going to use that anyway).

    Consumption is important to a healthy economy, waste allows consumption to be higher than it would be in an efficient system. To see this taken to it's extreme conclusion, check out "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley (available in the Gutenberg project I believe) where the citizenry is encouraged to constantly purchase new playthings to keep consumption up. Then take a moment to consider how much that seems like the way things are today.

    Of course, the problem is that resources are not infinite. Then again, the current mass-purchase items (music CDs and games) do not take that much resources to produce (especially in relation to their monetary cost)

    Rich

  • The buyer would either have to shell out the money to keep the satellites up there, or to do away with them in a way such that the remains don't pose a danger (i.e. don't crash down to Earth and reach it, and don't litter the orbit). Apparently, no-one who could ensure this is willing to pay money for the things.
  • At last the long awaited moment for all the astronomers of the world!!! The Iridium satellites were the largest polluter of the radio frequencies close to the 21cm hydrogen lines. Cheers!
  • The Register [theregister.co.uk]'s coverage states that it's costing several millions of dollars per month to maintain the network - who _could_ afford to take it over?
    I know Castle Harlan [theregister.co.uk] offerd $50million for it, and several Linux fans [theregister.co.uk] were going to use them as an open source datacomms network - but does anyone know what happened to those offers?
    Richy C. [beebware.com]
    --
  • people want to be wired (use fiber optics) and not be wireless (use satellite), which is nonsense and not a reason why they failed

    people don't want to be wired, they have to be - upstream bandwith is hopeless on mobile devices, and if it sucks for data, I don't want it.
  • What are you talking about? Why does an already bankrupt and kaput company need a tax shelter? Everything they have is losses. The banckrupcy court mandated that Iridium maintain the satelites and then destroy them safely. Every other dime went to their creditors. That's what banckrupcy means.
  • The Fall of Iridium (coming soon to a sky near you) is vindication of the view that people don't want WIRELESS, they want WIRED, as in max bandwidth. Undersea and underground fiber optic cables, not satellites, are the backbone of the worldwide internet - cheaper to install with much higher capacity.
    Maybe, maybe not. The flat I share (in the UK) with 4 people has well, one phone line and between us, 3 mobiles (cellphones). Guess whether I check my email on a landline or with the mobile, given the price is the same at off peak hours.

    And how many countries have more mobiles than landlines? How many more African villages have GSM mobile coverage than landline coverage?

    As for Britain, there are more people with digital TV coming into their house wireless (either terrestrial or satellite) than with digital cable.

    Oh, and I can get wireless xDSL (WipLL, actually, gets cool acronym points) faster and cheaper than wired here. (2.4Mb/s symetrical vs. 2Mb/s downstream and 256k up)

    Ambrose

  • The reason they were up there so quickly, before it was proved that there really was an economic want to be satisfied was due to competition.

    In total there were going to be _12_ different satelite telephony service providers. 6 voice oriented, 6 data. The stooopid way these companies decided to _pretend_ to be ahead of each other was by shooting more satelites into orbit. The one I did some consultancy for (ICO) was definitely slow at putting satelites into space, as we have a far more down to earth approach to our marketting and releases. It also pulled the plug quicker when it became obvious that the end was nigh.

    The concept of international/intercompany cooperation seemed to have eluded them. The idea of only having one swarm of satelites rather than 12 seemed completely alien. They lose money, remote areas lose useful comms potential. It was a lose lose situation.

    Bunch of arse!

    FatPhil

  • It takes a long time to put something like this together. When it was conceived, it was a revolutionary idea. When it was implemented, there was already much cheaper mobile capability on the ground in most inhabited places.

    It's a shame, though. These things were a boon for aid workers and others who work in really remote areas and couldn't afford a conventional satellite phone.

    -

  • Soon ago, we were debating [slashdot.org] about Using the Sky as a huge advertising screen.
    Motorola doesn't seem they have understood this concept as nobody would by a product which advertising campaign would be such [expensive|catastrophic]. :-)
    --
  • You'll still get to see 77 cool flashes as they plummet through the atmosphere... (And yes, it's 77, not 66 - they had 11 spares, a lot of which are already dead.)
  • ... for real this time!

    We have been having a big laugh over this, my company had the contract to do their billing system. Although the bean counters are upset they lost a customer, many on the tech staff are amused at the absurdity of the whole situation. It is always interesting to read about one of your customers in Dilbert.

    I found an article a while back about some explorers who were out in the wilds when the network went down. They had mixed feelings about losing their telephone connection to the civilized world, but they were very happy they could dump the large clunky handset.

    I saw a sign on a telephone pole the other day that said "We Buy Satellites!" I thought about calling them up and suggesting they contact Motorola...
  • I'm not too sure most people might understand why it failed. I used to work for Bell Mobility, which was partnered with Iridium and we were given a small presentation on the product and their goals. First of all the cell itself was the same size as a cell from 2-3 years ago. And it worked the same as a regular cell until it was attached to the "satellite transmission piece", then it became big clumsy piece of technology. The service for it was expensive, but you have to look at how Iridium was trying to market their product. They weren't trying to sell their service to everybody, they were trying to attract a corporate clientele that had the money and need to use such a service. I think where they went wrong was that they limited themselves to only offering phone services. Someone wrote that they failed because people want to be wired (use fiber optics) and not be wireless (use satellite), which is nonsense and not a reason why they failed. Both type of transmission offer different benefits. What Iridium should have done is also offer other services such as internet connectivity which is one of the only way to obtain broadband wireless connectivity.

  • Sad but not unexpected, even for Motorola (Score:3)

    by Claudius ( 32768 ) on Thursday August 24, 2000 @03:23AM (#831739)
    I attended an ionospheric modification conference some time ago ('94?) before Iridium was operational. At the conference one of the execs gave a presentation on Iridium where he very openly (for an exec) admitted problems with the business model and technical difficulties with their implementation of the system. I believe he concluded his talk with a statement to the effect of "Sure we'll have stiff competition for a very limited marketshare--three systems are planned and only one will survive. We hope to win by getting there first."

    There's a metaphor here somewhere.

  • the U.S. military should buy them ... (Score:3)

    by operagost ( 62405 ) on Thursday August 24, 2000 @02:33AM (#831740) Homepage Journal
    to use as target practice for the ABM system. ;-)
  • Do I call this FUD or ignorance?

    At least ignorance can be fixed.

    Satellite use and profits have never been higher. Believe it or not, you communicate all the time by satellite without even realizing it. Pagers and gas stations are two good examples.

    You mentioned cost, and that is just wrong. It may be cheaper to connect San Francisco and Tokyo by fiber in the long run. Connecting the entire continent of Africa is a gnu of a different color. Systems exist that allow, quite literally, you to fly over a site and drop by parachute a solar powered fixed station that would be ready to use the instant it hit the ground (and only that late because of the inconvenience of using it while still in the air.)

    Satellites require antennas to connect, but no direct connection of copper or fiber. This is a big thing when running through areas so poor that locals dig up wires to sell as scrap just as fast as companies/governments can put them in.

    Look at the roof of a gas staion, and you'll probably spot a small dish-like antenna. This is how those pumps communicate to verify your plastic. Yesterday I was buying power strips, and the company had a dialup verification system. It took noticably longer than do the pumps. How many times have we been delayed by long verification times at the pump? I can't think of any time it happened to me.

    Satellites and satellite bandwidth are in more demand now than at any time in history. There are currently over 600 birds in geosynchronous orbit, most of them communications specific. Don't confuse a lousy business execution with a nonexistant market.

    The worst thing about the failure of Iridium, which failed for business reasons, is that it poisoned an entire sector in many people's minds. Iridium failued because Iridium was a bad idea. Satellites are quite in demand, thank you.

    P.S. I make my living in the comm sat industry.

  • Re:Yay, Nay (Score:3)

    by streetlawyer ( 169828 ) on Thursday August 24, 2000 @03:37AM (#831742) Homepage
    No, an example of the marginal fallacy. The price of Motorola chips and beepers is set according to what the market will bear; they do not decide on a level of investment spend plus profits and then set prices in order to achieve that. The original poster is right to say that the loss was entirely borne by Motorola shareholders, and occurred some time ago when the sueless things were actually built.

  • Peace... (Score:3)

    by boy case ( 197665 ) on Thursday August 24, 2000 @02:27AM (#831743)
    Maybe people like it that there are some places on earth they can't be reached by phone.

  • Think Big (Score:4)

    by -brazil- ( 111867 ) on Thursday August 24, 2000 @02:22AM (#831744) Homepage
    As I see it, this is basically the kingsize version of lighting your cigarette with a $100 bill. I doubt that other companies will be able to top this anytime soon. A shame that stock buyers can't appreciate such displays of financial prowess...

  • An autopsy of Iridium (Score:5)

    by decaym ( 12155 ) on Thursday August 24, 2000 @03:02AM (#831745) Homepage

    Well, it sad to see Iridium go. I've followed is progress over the last several years and thought the concept really had a chance. Unfortunately, market tides and marketing foulups shifted under Iridum's feet, and they fell on their face. Let me tackle a few of the questions here.

    The time hasn't come yet.

    The time came five years ago even more than now. Iridium could have been used to bootstrap phone networks up in developing countries until regular cellular towers were available. One of the concepts was also a form of "village phone" that was basicly a phone booth with a sat antenna on top.

    Expensive bulky phones that didn't work indoors?

    The phones did have problems indoors. They really needed a line of site in order to connect up to the sats. It would have worked fine for a roof mounted antenna on a truck, ship, or plane. For some reason, the marketing brain power at Iridium decided to target mobile executives rather than commercial industry. Instead of trying to get a Fortune 500 CEO to carry one in a briefcase, they could have targeted trucking companies who do cross country runs, shipping that is in the middle of the ocean, and airlines who could use a cost effective replacement for those "Airphones" they try and charge $3/minute for. Iridium failed to target the tech to the market is was sufficient for.

    Why not just auction the suckers?

    Won't work. First, there is a lot of ground support involved. I believe the cost is at somewhere around $1M/day to operate the sats. Next, you have to send up replacements too often. This is not a geosync sat that just hangs out. This is five dozen plus sats in low orbit experiencing constant drag. Within a few years, the first generation sats will start coming home on their own. With a controlled deorbit, you can at least make sure they all end up in the ocean instead of having chunks of metal land in New York and Tokyo.

    Iridium completely missed the boat on data service. The system is designed around voice and low-bandwidth pager data. This was a major design flaw with the move to an information society over the last few years. If Teledesic [teledesic.com] gets off the ground, maybe my faith in these sat clusters will be renewed, but it will take a lot.

    The failure of these first generation sat clusters has hurt more than just the sat companies themselves. Several companies were developing new low cost launching technologies intended to support this market. You can write off Rotary Rocket [rotaryrocket.com] and serverl other companies because they saw their potential customer go away before they were even out the door.

    Such is life...

  • Yay! (Score:5)

    by AstroJetson ( 21336 ) <`gmizell' `at' `carpe-noctum.net'> on Thursday August 24, 2000 @02:38AM (#831746) Homepage
    Billions of dollars coming streaming down into our atmosphere.

    Remember folks, this is a *good* thing. Radio astronomers all over the world are rejoicing. Yes, it's a huge waste of money. But none of it was your money, so relax (unless you have stock in Mot). It's just another product that didn't work out. Think of them as Edsels in space.

    I *will* miss the cool flashes of light as they pass overhead, though. I saw a couple of them in broad daylight - probably mag. -6 or -7.

  • The Triumph of Fiber Optic Cable/Twilight of Sats (Score:5)

    by cybrpnk ( 94636 ) on Thursday August 24, 2000 @02:56AM (#831747)
    The Fall of Iridium (coming soon to a sky near you) is vindication of the view that people don't want WIRELESS, they want WIRED, as in max bandwidth. Undersea and underground fiber optic cables, not satellites, are the backbone of the worldwide internet - cheaper to install with much higher capacity. For years communications satellites have been the (sole) monemaker for space activities and provided the spur for further space development. Now that isn't true anymore - and I fear ALL space development will suffer as a result.

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